GoHuman Blog

One critical point to remember when developing a customer base is to, be selective in your choices.  First, determine what kind of customer “you” want to do business with.

One option is to do business with those who are mostly concerned about price and less about value/product/service. These types of customers are typically perceived as “high maintenance-low profit”, which means the minute they find a better price or think they’re paying too much, they’ll be looking for a better deal, someplace else.

Another option (preferred by most) is to do business with those who understand the true value and quality of the service and or product offered. These are the same customers who are willing to pay extra because of the “added-value” they know they’re getting and can trust. They want you to stay in business and they also understand you need to be profitable, in order to do so.

To simplify, the quality of your business is directly related to the quality of your customer

GoHuman supports local businesses and communities through a unique integrated approach to distributed ownership and responsibility. One of the ways we help is by bringing together like-minded companies who are working to achieve the same goals in their communities.

The Seattle Umbrella is Seattle’s only “Local Certification” service. Committed to promoting a sustainable and environmentally friendly local community in Seattle. Once your business is certified local, The Seattle Umbrella is your source for promotion to a highly targeted audience of people who genuinely want to support local business in Seattle.

Use their logo to gain recognition as a local business, as a marketing point, and as a statement that you support your community. Local businesses are the backbone of our community, and they are working to support practices that keep Seattle green, diverse, and sustainable.

Respond by Friday, June 4, and receive a 20% discount on your Seattle Umbrella membership and 6 months free basic subscription to GoHuman.com.

Whom do you trust most when making a decision to hire someone or buy something?

Most likely, you trust people you know: friends who have given you good recommendations, colleagues who have particular expertise, family, etc.

This type of trust has taken on a new form through the Internet and social media. Reviews for products and services are prevalent on GoHuman and elsewhere. These are useful, to be sure, but are subjective in nature.

GoHuman is allying with trusted organizations that promote local businesses. To represent this trust in a reliable and intuitive fashion, we have added a Trust Badge feature to GoHuman, which allows you to showcase your earned certifications, affiliations, and partnerships right along with your business postings, endorsements, and feedback.

Our first Trust Ally was the Green Business League, that provides Green Business Certification. We are working with several organizations to allow their members to proudly display their Trust Badges with GoHuman.

You can help by telling us about the organizations you trust and want to show off with GoHuman. We’ll work together to provide more exposure for you and all your fellow members.

Ultimately this will help your online reputation, which will lead to more trust, which helps get you more leads.

Our mission is to bring you the best quality marketing assistance at the lowest cost. GoHuman.com offers very low cost subscription upgrades for you to list your business in more ZIP codes or feature different products and services in different markets.

You can upgrade or downgrade you account at any time via your account management page on GoHuman.

$5/month gives you 15 postings, which helps you market specific services to customers in other ZIP codes.

$9/month gives you 30 postings as well as a unique WebAddress, which makes it easier for people to find your business posting on the Web. (http://www.gohuman.com/chicago-lawyer)

We’re excited to announce a unique partnership with Red Spot Marketing, which provides marketing planning, consulting and management services to small and medium sized businesses across North America.

Join GoHuman for free today and you’ll get more exclusive marketing help for your business! Already a GoHuman member? The just drop us a line.

The first 10 members to respond receive: 12 months of $9 GoHuman.com subscription level ($1,080 total value!)

AND everyone who responds by April 15 receives: 6 months of $5 GoHuman.com subscription level ($30 value each) and Red Spot’s Free Marketing Planning Start Bundle that includes:

• Marketing Plan Template
• Marketing Plan Sample
• Marketing Plan Budget Spreadsheet

This set of templates and guides retails for $99 but is free for GoHuman members. It includes everything you need to get a marketing plan and monthly budget put together. This is the most important part of the marketing process.

Red Spot is partnering with GoHuman to gain more exposure to small and medium sized businesses within the GoHuman network.

As the GoHuman community grows, Red Spot Marketing will be bringing a number of exclusive offers to our members designed to help them implement better marketing practices and grow their business by marketing outside of GoHuman and learning how to get the most from their GoHuman experience.

Red Spot has ten full time marketing management consultants plus a support network of marketing back office staff to help manage the execution of their 100 plus clients’ marketing.

Focused on affordable integrated marketing designed to generate new leads for their clients, Red Spot Marketing uses a variety of awareness and lead generation marketing both online and offline to generate new leads for clients every month.

Join GoHuman for free today to get started!

Congrats James Wood, of Abbotsford, B.C., Canada — our latest Flip Video camera winner!

James is a local business consultant. Call him today for help finding new business opportunities!

James said, “Since being a part of GoHuman.com, it’s changed my life. I’ve met so many small business owners that have enriched the world I live in. They have inspired my own growth, they have rekindled my artistic flame within me, they have dared me to be not good..but great in what I do, each and every day.

”GoHuman.com is not a passing fad. It truly is a family of like minded individuals concerned with the communities they live in, bringing out the best in all, and realizing that we are ONE!”

James, you are truly one of a kind. Thanks for everything you’ve done to support GoHuman over the past months!

GoHuman is all about empowering small businesses and independent professionals by connecting them with the right customers in their community to establish a more sustainable economy. We’re not the only ones with this idea, which is a great thing. We can’t do it alone, and we depend on people everywhere who believe there is a better way.

But how do we do it?

Word of mouth has proven time after time to be the single most powerful form of marketing. People trust people like themselves, who are typically people they know well like friends or family.

At this stage in GoHuman’s growth, we are connecting with as many small businesses as possible in Chicago; L.A.; Madison, WI; Knoxville, TN; and Vancouver, Canada. You might ask why we’ve chosen those particular areas and I would tell you that in a way they chose us.

We believe in involving people who share our vision for a better, more equitable world, no matter where they are. We’re looking for people to join our grassroots marketing teams, whether they are in one of our existing markets or if someone has the gumption to get a new market going. It’s happened before, and we welcome anyone who is up for the challenge and the rewards.

Businesses everywhere are hurting. People everywhere are being shut down by the powers that be. GoHuman.com represents a genuinely better way for business to work to support themselves and their community.

There is nothing more inspiring than meeting new people who want to join the cause. Some have established themselves in their community and others are just looking for a way to help make things better. Either way, it’s the fuel that moves us forward and gives us hope that our dream can work.

And guess what? People just like you are growing GoHuman.

If you’re interested in joining our team and becoming a Founding Member of GoHuman.com, just email refer@GoHuman.com for more info. We guarantee that an actual human will respond.

I’ve been cooking up this blog since I lived in Germany in the early 90s.  I read “Food 2000″, a coffee-table book, touting “food miracles” – scientists solving world hunger and such.  It was sponsored propaganda against Alliance 90/The Greens.  I was horrified by what I saw.

I was just beginning to recover from an “incurable” auto-immune-related condition little understood by Medical Science, using dietary and other natural methods.  I told myself I would help change the system of systems.

Now Agribusiness is moving from propaganda to sinister control.  Scientific American, explains how Bio-engineering companies own articles published about their seed. Cropchoice.com explains how farmers using seed infected by patented seed are guilty of stealing.  Food Inc. is eating up the conscience of consumers.  Watch it, and take a symbolic stand, however small.

Yesterday Forbes arrived, with Monsanto on the cover as Company of the year.  Forbes’ arrogance since the economic meltdown has shocked this longtime reader.  The Frankenstein monster of business is  running rampant.  Our food supply is controlled by companies bio-engineered for greed.

Greg Brown sings “I watched my country turn into a coast-to-coast strip mall and I cried out in a song: if we could do all that in thirty years, then please tell me you all – why does good change take so long?”  Join us and speed up change.

Why GoHuman.com? reason #6?  Local Food

Fight for your right to control your own food!

Reason #1; Reason #2; Reason #3; Reason #4; Reason #5;

Next Time #7: All Hail Snopes! Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

Capitalism is driven by advertising.  It pays for our lifestyle but at what cost?

Global corporations reverse-engineer our psyche with mega-million-dollar advertising budgets, and program us on what to buy.  A system of systems arose profiting from the consumption of crap – euphemism intended.  Stellar brands for worse than worthless products are built by these machines.

Coke “adds life” – and 8 teaspoons of sugar to a nation struggling with diabetes and obesity epidemics.  Sugar free versions contributed to cancer, alongside a cancer causing scourge sold to us by sexpots, future presidents, babies, Mickey Mantle and Santa Claus.  What no-one wants can be sold for massive profits.

What’s wrong with that?

Maybe sponsorship is merchandising the bodies and souls of men?  If that’s too dark, Raj Patel’s video on The Value of Nothing is a good chaser.

Why GoHuman.com? reason #5: Our business model is not advertising.  Our growth depends on members taking owning up, not selling out.

Does Santa Clause cancer?

Reason #1; Reason #2; Reason #3; Reason #4;

Reason #6?: Food Fight!; Reason #7; Reason #8; Reason #9; Reason #10; Reason #11; Reason #12

All this speculation about Google buying Yelp for half a billion dollars starts to sound suspiciously like some of the other high finance deals that led to the current economic crisis. But at the end of the day, these are two corporations beholden to shareholders and investors with wealth aggregated at the top and controlled from the top. Worse still, that wealth is still leaving your community.

Where’s the little guy in all this? The independent local professional or small business who just needs to get more customers in the door, no matter who happens to own the search traffic or content at that particular moment.

Google was supposed to be in the business of objectively aggregating the world’s information, not owning it. Buying Yelp ensures a degree of control over the content that is created. And remember who’s creating all that content? You and me.

Yelp was a directory created to give consumers a democratic voice in recommending brick and mortar businesses. I believe their motives were pure, but they leaned so far in favor of the consumer as to alienate businesses who now tell extortion-like tales. The review system is limited and features such as business responses and custom business info are afterthoughts at best.

There is a better way.

What if the website that contained all the customer feedback alllowed businesses to express themselves and interact in a more natural, independent way?

Better yet, what if the people who contribute to the website community end up owning it?

GoHuman.com represents something completely different — 1000’s of sustainable localized business communities connected through the Web yet protected from the rampant evaporation of local wealth. We’re building a unique collaborative economic structure that directly rewards those who contribute to its growth. It’s a revolutionary concept that takes a bit of faith to absorb, but we truly believe it will transform local communities from the inside out, equalizing the gap between the big guys and the little guys.